


È Fatto

by optimouse



Series: Marchaue [1]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-30
Updated: 2011-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:43:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/optimouse/pseuds/optimouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The key of the battle isn’t in the victory, it is in the dance—the dance between good and evil allows free will. That said, the true champion battles not just evil, but good as well."<br/>Author's Notes: I would like to verbalize my gratitude to my lovely beta, faithburke as well as the most brilliant artist, caersmane. Thank you so both for your time and effort!<br/>Written for the aubigbang on lj 2010</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

Title:  _È fatto._

Author: optimouse

Summary: “The key of the battle isn’t in the victory, it is in the dance—the dance between good and evil allows free will. That said, the true champion battles not just evil, but good as well.”

Fandom: Highlander

 

Part 1

 

 

Section A.

He’d driven from Seacouver to Colorado Springs to his hide-away there. He had hopped the first train from Colorado Springs aimed towards Los Angeles. From Los Angeles and the building where the Watchers kept their server, it was a train to Seacouver. He hadn’t bothered to pay the price for the sleeper car.

There was a confrontation in Seacouver. Apparently, hunting parties were no longer in the younger MacCleod’s interests, unless he was going to be hunting Methos, and not Cassandra, who had left town after he’d disappeared. It was of no consequence, he wasn’t here for the brat, anyway. He’d needed to talk to Joe.

From Seacouver, Methos traveled East, towards St. Louis, Missouri, and the Cakahomia Mounds. Then to Chicago. Back to the west, heading south bound towards Phoenix. A plane flight to London.The train, going to the continent. Changing to the TGV, headed towards St. Petersburg. From what was once Leningrad, he took a bus as far as the Caucasus Mountains. He’d had a Watcher assigned to him since he’d swept through Chicago. Or perhaps his _Chronicles_ from the sixties were as interesting as he remembered the period to be.




There at the base of the mountains, he went looking for horses. He and Kronos had set up this sanctuary years and years before, high in the mountains. Methos could hike there, but going on horseback would allow him to make better time. It also allowed his Watcher to live through this trip. There were dangers on the trail that would prove deadly to Mortals. This was a hunt that would need to be documented.

Legends were useless if they were not ground in.

There was a phone call before he left the village. He was only being followed by the Watchers; Martos had hunted him but rarely, and Martos had always thought Kronos to be the full threat to his life and his mention of a coerced peace.

“Miriam.” The voice on the other end spoke sharply, berating him for disappearing, then softly saying she loved him. “I need you to set up a new identity for me.” More short questions. “I love you too, Miry-ya.”

And then it was time to leave in the morning.

 

 

 

Section B.

Javier Scotten had been assigned to the Leto Doe case in Chicago. It had been Isla’s death that had tipped the Watchers to this particular Immortal’s existence as immortal; they’d thought him to be a former researcher for them before that named Adam Pierson.

Leto was not needlessly violent. That much he had learned through three hunts and following the Immortal. He knew that he had a Watcher, and Javier got the impression that the last bit of the journey slowed, in recognition of that fact. Adam Pierson as he had been known had also been known for his cautious demeanor, and Javier wondered what exactly gave various Immortals the ability to so quickly change their entire personality if they needed to do such, so as to better be able to adapt, to hide, to run, and to do all of these things quickly.

But while violent and prone to dirty interrogation techniques amped for an immortal body to take, Leto never was cruel. He was hunting something, but Javier had no idea what had made him start hunting. Perhaps if he were to call the various Watchers who had been in Seacouver when they’d thought Adam Pierson to be naught but a simple researcher . He’d been assigned to the Methos Chronicles, as Javier recalled. Perhaps the Watchers who had been in Seacouver in the months previous to Leto sudden extroversion would have more intelligence for Javier to complete his picture with?

He’d used trains and the bus for the majority of his trip, but had taken a plane trip from Phoenix to London: the airline was neither incredibly interested in security nor expensive. Less visibility, Javier supposed. And now they were going into the Caucasus Mountains.

They were going after something, hell if he knew what.

Three hours up the trail in the mountains and Javier Scotten wanted to go back down again. He definitely appreciated the horse, a stolid and steady mare who had yet to spook. It was this waiting that was horrid.

He and his mare were stashing themselves about 50 feet from a cave, trying to do the whole ‘I’m not spying, I swear, I’m a Watcher!’ thing behind a bush. Of course, it was that attitude that had made his superiors in the Regional Office more than a little pissed off. His credit line was still lagging.

“You might as well drop tie the mare.” A voice drifted out of the cave. “I know that you’re there, and I also know you want a better view.” A pause, and the voice came again. “Get in here, you’ll want to see this.”

“See what?” He _scurried_ , that was the best word for it, forward, and into the cave. The man, Leto, as he’d introduced himself to that dead Immortal, was leaning against the back wall of a medium sized cave.

“See this.” The man stroked a particularly pointy bit of wall, and then the cave began to groan. Back, back, back slid the wall of the cave, ripping apart as a medium sized room was opened to the air. “Welcome to the Archives of the Hunt.”

 

 

 

 **Section C.**

 **_FLASHBACK!_ **

            “Ramirez,” The Egyptian immortal peered over at Connor. They’d just left another town, Connor having taken the head of an immortal gone crazy with either age or a bad quickening or both. He’d been murdering townsfolk to see if they would rise from the dead, and it was just his luck that Connor had. “The Immortal, he was going on about something. Marchaue. Do you know what that is?” Connor asked.

            Connor watched the elder immortal sigh, turn away, rub his nose. Fiddle with the hilt of his sword, and that was when Connor began to become itchy. Ramirez was waffling about answering, either uncertain of which answer to give, to give an answer at all, or the veracity of the answer that he would give to his student.

            “Yes, actually.” Ramirez wasn’t sure how to explain this. “Marchaue was a legend when I was a young Immortal, and it’s an Immortal legend, somewhat like the legend of Methos or of the Methusaleh stone.”

            “Oh?” The Methusaleh stone was an odd bit of legend, a bit of crystal able to give the wearer true immortality, and only known to Immortals, the most of whom had at one time or another hated their Immortality as their mortal families died.

            “It was a city. You’ve read Plato’s Republic? It was a city in speech given form.” Ramirez tried to explain. “An Immortal went from town to town, city to city, finding Immortals, speaking to them about his dream of a city where Immortals could live together, safe from the human populace. Now, we’ve learned how to master ourselves, but then? It happens periodically that some religion that believes in blood learns about Immortals, uses them. This was one of those time periods: there were Immortals pretending to be a mastering god, or Immortals forced to be their gods enslaved to the people.” Ramirez remembered those stories. He had never lived one of those stories, but he had known one Immortal in Alexandria who had told him of a period of ten years when he had been held by a cult. Eventually rescued by one of his brothers, Kaspian had been sitting in the University at Alexandria when he’d told Ramirez the story, and still made certain to sit in the sunlight when he related it.

            “And thus the city was built, supposedly in the Middle East, and it drew to it many young immortals and many immortals not-yet-old, but tired of fighting.

            Four Immortals came, the students of the Preacher, and they lived among the people there, marrying, and eventually there were children. One of them was born to a man named Charon and his spouse, Chron.

            Then as they lived, it was a thousandth year, and a man came to them, speaking to the Teacher, asking about their way of life. Attracted to the power of the Immortals, the city of Marchaue fairly buzzed with their Quickenings. Some say that the reason it’s impossible to find the land on which the city stood is because the land Quickened from their strength, and now hides itself, sentient.

            The man who came and walked among them was given the title of Hhrimun, and introduced himself as such, and he was strange to their eyes. He did not worship, did not have the Quickening, but didn’t hum like a human to the ears of Charon and several of the oldest, who had learned that humans hummed to their ears like the Immortals sang. Instead, he was silent, a nefarious silence without murmurings in the deep.” Ramirez spun his story “And then it was the longest night of the thousandth year, and the Teacher welcomed the Stranger, Hrihmun to take all of the city.

            The streets ran red with blood as from room to room, people died for the Stranger. And of that, Charon rose and became Challenger, Champion, and the Stranger left Marchaue, the Teacher in his wake, and four of a city of four hundred were left, and four rode, their Wrath aimed at the Teacher, brothers in arms, no longer ideals.” Ramirez finished. “And that is the story of Marchaue, as it was recounted to me.”

            “Children?”

 

 

 

 **Section D.**

The home in Chicago was one of the brothers’ favorites. Scyllas, or Silas as he was now written of in the Watcher journals, had found the area first. Having traveled to the new world as a member of one of the French expeditions, he had become attached to the place where the great river attached to the lake, and bought a large plot of land with a view of the lake when that was first possible.  He had occupied it continually until then.

The span of their lives allowed such behavior. This home was the most favored of Kronos’ homes, for the sentimental reasons. He’d spent the majority of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the first tenth of the twentieth in Russia. While he was not always fond of the tsars, he was quite fond of Mongolia, of Siberia, and even on occasion the government of Russia. It was most certainly the Russians that he was most fond of. Pessimism springs oft eternal, but it was the Bolsheviks that convinced Kronos to head west. Looking back on the last century of European history, he was quite glad that he’d gotten out before the maelstrom.

He had arrived in the United States on a boat, dressed in the full suit recommended to him by a student. His Methos was already here, he’d heard, having abandoned the movement for Emancipation as it became irrelevant, and was now, typically, writing essays and letters in favor of equal rights in the eyes of the law. Kronos had been known to wish that Methos had been nowhere near Rome during the creation of the Twelve Tables. His husband had spent the next four centuries serving as a jurist in various parts of the Roman Empire, and had kept his love for the law and its study.

Of course it fit; echoing back to their early lives, but it still was troublesome. For an Immortal who said that he hadn’t felt guilt since the fourteenth century, Kronos’ husband was quite interested in the intricacies of justice. Perhaps it was the remnants of his youth in Ur, or the time he had spent, the good years, with Martos, when the city was just words, and then before Marchaue was destroyed.

His husband met Kronos in New York with a hansom cab, and from there they took to a train. While not his first stint in the States, it was the first such stint that coincided with his husband, and they would stay together in Chicago until 1930. It was in 1930 that Methos and their young child accompanied Silas to Europe, first to modern Ukraine to check on their brother Kaspian went Silas. Methos had taken Iphigenia to Paris, to be introduced to Darius, and then to one of Methos’ favorite cities, to live with Avram Mordecai, of their line. They adopted identities as Jews, to be allowed to live close to a synagogue, and Methos had studied at the rabbinical school.

It was where Supriya had brought Methos after the war, smuggling her teacher [as a corpse] over borders. The Chicago home, five floors of brick warehouse. The home that would be one of the worst homes to assail without a tank of a plane equipped to bomb. The home that would last at the very least another two hundred years to serve the House of Kaph [κ] as they now called the lines of the Four Brothers.

Then, before the war, it had been words on paper, sketches, drawings, drafts, and calculations.  Now it was brick, 12 inch square support beams run through with metal rods, the only large windows high in the building and those were still outnumbered by the arrowslits. All of the windows and doors had inner shutters, heavy metal or wood to close and bar in need.

Lounging on the only portrait window in the home, on the fifth floor, in the turret that ran the full height of the building, Kronos luxuriated in the heat that radiated beneath his feet. The turret on this level held a desk and chair, and the window. On the floors below, it held the radiator, a mammoth that had been especially designed to warm the house. It was in this room nearly sixty five years before that he had sat still while one of the twins set the bones in his hands as the other had hurriedly called down to the servant girl below-stairs to bring more clean bedding.

It was in these rooms that young Nestor had grown to adulthood. He and his husband had separated, Methos taking Nestor to University in England, and Kronos going west once again. This time he’d gone towards San Francisco and what he’d heard of there—a community of so-called radicals, sexual deviants, of societal dissidents. It had amused him that his husband had found a similar situation in England with which to amuse himself, and reshaped himself as his student’s student. Byron was always a bit foppish, and it didn’t surprise Kronos that he would have run with that crowd, the crowd that Methos had ran into him in.

Chicago was where Nestor returned to with his blushing bride. Ethel, though everyone called her Ada, was even approved of by the most reclusive of their family members, Hygelac, called Heidi Gellard, now. The wedding had been triumphal, and Ada had eventually given Kronos and his Methos a granddaughter, Eos.

Chicago was where Cassandra had run Ada and Nestor through with blades before killing Eos and displaying her body on the doorstep of the Fortress. Chicago was where the world had ended and began again.

 

 **  
**

**Section E.**

 

The business allowed him to hoard money. There were accounts in Brussels, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and the Antilles, and these were the visible accounts. He was a crafty old man, or so Martos thought, for all of his issues with comprehension that his hunters were taking slow advantage of.

There was a plot of land in Russia, and there had been the same plot, owned by the same person, for quite a while. Though, of course, one could quibble with the claim of the ownership, it had gone through several shell companies trading it back and forth. Each of Martos’ children, his students, had been brought there, and each had stayed for awhile. Building happened periodically on the rather larger lot. 20 kilometres in square, he started and stopped building erratically, not necessarily coinciding on when he’d had building permits or money. The small mortal village that sat next to Martos’ building plans was there on his sufferance, not at his need, he told himself. The fact that they did the majority of building on his complex, grew the majority of the food, did not keep him from thinking that they were not needed, instead leading him to think of the village as his serfs.

Cassandra, his favorite daughter, thought that the land in which his city complex was located was special in some way. That the land, the shape and form of it amplified the resonance of the large crystal deposits in the mountains that surrounded the rather oddly shaped valley.

It was as if, to her eyes, the gods had reached a hand into the mountains and uprooted one as if it were a plant. This cosmic weeding had left a valley almost circular, with the void left bare of the heavy forest that covered the mountains around it. There was little coverage in the Valley, dominated by Martos’ seat of power, and littered with half-built structures.

The serfs’ village nestled just out of the valley, in the forest, against an open mine. The crystal was luminescent, a clear stone shot through with color, and quite cheap. Mobiles of the stones hung above the babies’ cribs, and most of the village wore a bit of it in pieces of jewelry. There was certainly a bit in every home except Martos’ ‘Big House.’

Martos, Martin, Torrance, Martin Beauregard leaned back in his plane seat at the plane taxied down the runway and into the airport. He opened the first pages of his book. It had been printed, not published, in a short run edition, in a plain black binding.  The only lettering was on the cover in a tiny block font done in silver.

 _“The Gathering is a lie, and excuse for us to fight, to live our lives like cockroaches, scurrying into corners and away from the light. Wehide, terrified of the mortals over whom we tower like gods. No, they are the insects, their lives as akin to what ours can be as flies are to their own lives._

 _They worship a man who dies and rose again, and we are that man. From our graves we crawl with the power to level cities, our only deaths possible and the hands of another. We become of one mind, of one soul when we gather together, and mortals, they have no soul and seek for us to have not one either with the tales of the gathering, of making us fight._

 _We share our souls, stealing, giving, having it torn away, because as we share one soul, it dances amongst us, happiest when it is freely given.”_

The seatbelt signal went off, and the pilot came over the loudspeaker. Martin wondered why the soul-less had to be so loud today, and closed his book.

 


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part II of E Fatto, and the move to Pittsburgh.

Title:  _È fatto._

Author: optimouse

Summary: “The key of the battle isn’t in the victory, it is in the dance—the dance between good and evil allows free will. That said, the true champion battles not just evil, but good as well.”

Fandom: Highlander

 

Part 2

 

 

 

 **Section A**

There hadn’t been much in Colorado Springs, and Leto hadn’t the heart to inform his watcher that the reason to stop in Colorado has been to switch legal identities, and that was the only reason. Adam Pierson had left Seacouver following a short stint working with the Chronicles that Joe Dawson had kept there, brought to an abrupt end by his admission on Dawson’s answering machine that recognizing his ex-girlfriend from his days as an undergraduate had thrown him off balance. Adam was, he’d said, going to leave town, having decided to head to his friend’s apartment in Colorado Springs for a visit and to regain his calm. One gas leak later, Leto Amunsen was reporting his Social Security number and driver’s license as stolen, and having them reissued before heading to Chicago.

Javier thought Colorado was pivotal. It wasn’t. Only thing interesting about Colorado Springs was the fact that he had left a stash of necessary documents there in case of an emergency. To Methos’ mind, Cassandra’s appearance, and the thankful warning of his husband before hand, counted as an emergency. Of course, emergency was the wrong word for the _vendetta_ that was building. Cassandra owed him and Kronos blood debt, as the guilt was hers for the death of their son, of their daughter by law and by love, of their granddaughter, their beloved little dawn.

The only reason Methos hadn’t lost his head to Cassandra or Duncan dancing on Cassandra’s strings in Seacouver had been his husband’s timely warning. It was an old trick of theirs. In times of discontent, when one wanted to warn the other of danger, but being known to be in the acquaintance of the other would be to endanger the other, one would hover on the edge of the other’s sensory range. The proximity of their quickening allowed them to convey their warnings, familiar pulses echoing into each other. The millennia, Marchaue, and many shared Quickenings allowed certain resonance between the two of them.

Kronos had wished to warn his husband of the coming danger of Cassandra. She’d swept through the states, taking no heads, only speaking to various Immortals. However, she had dirtied her hands in the blood of multiple mortals. One a watcher, watching his assignment and the cult of resurrectionists that his assignment was creating, those who worshipped, who believed that in finding one who rose from the dead that they could _use_ that one to rise from the dead themselves.

One was a pre-Immortal in a city where three of the nearby Immortals shunned Martos’ column, and when she would return into life much longer, she would most likely follow their plans. An accidental beheading falling out a window. Kronos had seen the footage, Cassandra  had _vocally_  pushed the child out the window.

And the third was the one that had grasped Kronos’ attention, Methos had found the note in Chicago, at the house there. Kronos had abandoned Chicago to chase after the student of the teacher that they had repudiated, but had left enough of a note for Methos to truly understand what might had set Cassandra off.  And reacted, perhaps with not cruelly, but certainly with the intention of creating dread through warning.

Cassandra had most likely heard the stories of the few Immortal pregnancies. They were spread amongst the Immortals pretty thinly. The pregnancy itself was pretty rare, as only two Immortals could engender the spark needed to generate the pregnancy.  What was even more rare was the pregnancy going to full term. That only ever seemed to have happened when the pregnancy was fully supported by the bearing parent, and those around them. As Immortals tended to be quite solitary beings, they rarely had much of a support system other than mortal spouses and their line-kin, and thus there were often miscarriages. Add to the fact that taking a quickening often ended the quickening of a life within their bodies, many pregnancies had ended in bloody sheets, males and females alike.

Methos had actually made a scientific study of this at one point, postulating that there were only Immortals involved in the conception, and that all Immortals could carry children. He’d certainly done enough autopsies to confirm his belief, and it was from the Immortal pregnancies, the mortal children that they bore, and the few, very few, Immortals born this way [Methos had only recorded 4 or 5 in six thousand years] that the human population had the rare, recessive gene to allow internal and external sex organs to have no true relationship to one another. Or how it was called in layman’s terms, the phenomenon of male pregnancy. To Methos’ understanding, it was not the physical display of genitalia that necessarily allowed the pregnancy, but rather, the activity of the internal genitalia.

Cassandra had heard the stories, and thought that she truly fit the requirements for the phenomenon. She was both female, and a member of Martos’ column, of the view that there was a holy duty that the Immortals both put aside their swords, and participate in his city, in the city that he thought an appropriate worship of the victory of good over evil. She would be a good mother, and was angered that she had never become one. She wanted to be able to reproduce, to give children to the city.

Reading through some of the early diaries of Kronos, the second oldest student of her teacher, to find that he and his lover, the oldest student, the dead student Charon had borne Kronos children, she had been enraged.  Her few interactions with the four Immortals, the self proclaimed ‘Four Horsemen,’ had led her to believe them a rather unprincipled bunch; they _did not deserve_ to have ever had a child.

She slowly began the hunt, following Kronos through the ages. She managed to do damage to them, to _Kronos_ and his new lover, this _Methos_ , who shared the gift that Charon had had, and anger had grown in her heart, nipping at her heels and enflaming her mind. Cassandra traced them to Milan, and a home there. _Methos_ had taken another name, Iphigenia, and bore as wife to Kronos, a merchant of the city, three children while they shared a student, Torrin.

Cassandra had taken Torrin de Milano’s head the moment he left Milan, taking for herself the quickening, directing it and its knowledge to her mind a more rightful home within herself.

All she learned was not enough, but she heard a whisper on the winds, and Martos murmured into her ears of the Millenium Child, the Champion against Ahriman, and she traveled north to the Donnan Woods. There she lay the strings that her Teacher had bade her to spin for their line’s control over the child, and asked no questions as to why she should do so.

The child eventually wandered, and years later, one of her line kin brought to her rumors that Kronos and Methos had produced a child, and gone hunting.

No, Chicago was pivotal. Chicago and the _Monastery_ , Chicago where Supriya, Cornelius, and Cornelia had delivered Nestor. Chicago, where Methos and Kronos had watched their son marry Ada, where Silas and Eva had lived for years, Chicago where Eos Elizabeth had been born.

Chicago with three head stones aligned together, the central headstone wept over by an angel.

Colorado was incidental, Chicago had sparked the beginning of this encompassing, focusing rage as Methos tracked, but Kronos dogged her footsteps. No, Martos was too smart to arouse the sleeping dragon that were the remnants of his first four students, but Cassandra’s obsession would not be less than welcome. He might have tried to curb it, as it brought attention to them, but it helped him weed out those who did not believe in what he did.

 

 

 

 **Section B**

            There weren’t all that many places for Ceoc to feel truly safe. He was officially of the line of Martos, called the Callen, but he had his issues with the head of his line. For example, the tithe of his holdings in the interests of his teacher’s dreamed city was not in his preference. He would much rather spend the money on a good sword than on a situation that seemed to him to begs swords. His two students tended to call themselves as his students, of his line, and not of his Teacher’s line, except for several very uncomfortable interludes.

            Ceoc had always been a wanderer, and that was how his master-teacher had found him as a student. He had been with a trading crew in Constantinople, and his first death had been at the hands of a merchant less than fond of his trading practices. Who knew that they didn’t want superior goods at superior [for his wallet] prices? His preference would have been to be informed of his Immortality and the qualities therein, and then to engage a swords-teacher, but instead Martos had scooped him up, _insisting_ on teaching him swordplay and spoon feeding him the rhetoric of an imagined city. All Immortals had the quickening, the quickening was a great power, the fight between good and evil. He had actually found it all quite irritating. Yes, the quickening he had found to be a rush, but he’d much rather wander than live in a city, and living in a city with other people with swords and a potential yen for his quickening would be most lacking in fun.

            Of course, he was of an age, not quite as old as Ramirez, certainly not as old as Cassandra, but not as young as Connor MacCleod either, that appropriate paranoia would allow him to survive. Ceoc had eventually left his teacher’s side, and wandered further south-east, the Near-East, it was called, and into the lands held by the Saladins. It was in Jerusalem that he met a girl called Eva, who had pulled him in off of the street and into her home.

            Ceoc had one student, his brother-in-arms, Lorne. A fellow northerner with hair the color of the sun shining on the ice of the rivers in a Norwegian winter, and eyes a pale enough blue to nearly match the white of his hair, they had to take precautions more than most Immortals when travelling. Lorne Skele shared with his teacher their third student, whom they sheltered from the reality of their line while embracing a rather nomadic lifestyle.

            He’d heard that Martos, now called Martin, was working as a businessman, and Ceoc had discovered the truth in the rumor while spying upon his former teacher as a bellhop in the hotel. Apparently his teacher still adored his luxuries, and was not as circumspect in his dealings as he had been in Constantinople. And of his spying, Ceoc would like to reaffirm his thankfulness to Eva for teaching him this trick, of suppressing the Quickening so that you might go unnoticed by another Immortal, or unleashing it so that you could unfurl it upon another and overwhelm them.

            Ceoc sighed. There was some residual gratitude to the Immortal that had saved him from being a headhunter’s snack, but Martos’ rhetoric had always grated on him. An eternal fight between good and evil to possess the quickening seemed a bit full of itself, especially the whole ‘Avatar’ bit. The idea of a group of Immortals in service to the good seemed a bit redundant, not to mention in a less than perfect state for any commercialism. There would be _no trade_ in this society that his teacher spoke of.

            Commerce and wandering were the two great loves of Ceoc’s lives, other than Lorne and their student. He was an Immortal, which had given him a great deal of time to hone his skills with the markets, and as he wasn’t in it for the money, but rather for the exchange, the intellectual spark, and the great deal of fun he had either staying inside of or outside of the law, never the both at the same time, that would be unsporting. Commerce, trade, supply, demand. A lifestyle keeping serfs like Martos’ city would have to do, in Martos’ own writing, would be stagnant, truly. Why sell someone else’s hard work, Ceoc thought. It seemed most unsporting.

            His distaste for this whole idea of Martos’ city was based on his economic views, Ceoc assured himself. Not the stories that Eva had told him of a city called Marchaue, he swore. Not the stories, his economic views were his only reason for his distaste.

 

 

 

 **Section C**

The choice of Pittsburgh was a strategic choice for Methos.  It had no connections to Leto Amunsen, passion-filled Immortal, a Brit by birth, found nestled into Hadrian’s Wall. It had no connections to George Byron, Leto’s teacher. George had always found blue collar life to be boring, or so it was pretty generally believed.

Of course, George had also tended to disappear every so often from the Watcher’s careful eyes.

Pittsburgh would fit Amunsen’s former alias, Adam Pierson to the discerning eye. A small business, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, a bakery in Pittsburgh, a university in Seacouver, UPitt in Pittsburgh.

Methos had few ties to the city: he’d wandered through a few times in the nineteenth century, and his appall at the excrement that the mines pumped into the streets had him swiftly moving through. Methos had added it to a list of cities that he was not fond of, for that time period.

Strategically, it had a large enough infrastructure that if his planning for the ambush went awry, and he was hunted, that he could disappear within the multitudes. Union Station would allow him to flee with his sword, there was public transportation to be had, and the police were vigilant.

Pittsburgh was big enough of a city that he could open a new shop without it being remarked upon throughout town, but it was not New York, which held Connor MacLeod, Washington DC that held Matthew McCormick, or Boston and that cult that followed Finn and his two women, Lucinda  andAnke. Finn’s line was a variation of Martos’ speech with ‘free, unfettered love’ mixed in. And it wasn’t the South, which irritated him, pretty generally for New Orleans. Pittsburgh would be visited by Martos, according to the website that Beauregard Imports had uploaded onto the web. Even the dates were listed.

So Pittsburgh it was, and that had given Leto his truest choice.  George had questioned Leto’s choice of business, and while he did a fair amount of baking for a few places around the city, it was a store of one front and two businesses. He did not sell baked goods over the counter, only created them with the muscles that the work created for their own sake.  He’d even hired someone to mind the truth of the store, his Watcher was currently a general busybody around the store.

For all that his teacher/student swore that he had no artistic bones in his body, the paint that the oldest one had used on the canvas in front of him belied that fact, George thought. He’d read some of his teacher’s poems in his time, the lyric poems that Doc, as he still preferred to call his teacher, had written in Classical Greek. He’d asked specifically to learn how to speak the Greek spoken and written on Lesbos for this purpose, asked to be taught this by his teacher.

George was fond of his teacher, perhaps for more fond of him than was strictly good for his health. He’d first met the man as Doc Polidori, and when he’d fished him out of the Hellespont, having died of drowning, he’d been a little taken aback. It had not taken long for the two to become fast friends.

Ah well, perhaps George could deal with Pittsburg when he arrived there, instead of his avoidance thus far. He had no room to judge without actually setting foot in the city instead of speaking on the phone almost daily with his teacher, listening to his teacher relate his research and his preparation for the upcoming Challenge. Apparently Methos had found the itinerary of Martos out after tracking Cassandra’s internet interests, and George wasn’t completely sure that he wanted to know how his teacher had found out her internet interest, though he had a feeling that it had to do with a great deal of sneaking, originally, and probably in Seacouver.

George sighed and stepped out of the cab, pulling his luggage behind him such that he could tote it into the terminal where it would be placed on his plane to the US from Paris. He was flying into Atlanta, he believed, rubbing his nose. The next day was going to be hell.

 

 

 

 **Section D**

The math had never been Methos’ ability. Of all of the four brothers, Caspian had shown the most aptitude for higher mathematics, but that had been years, and years ago, before an encounter with Cassandra in the ruins of the school of Hypatia. Looking down at the account books that he’d created for his cover here in Pittsburg, he could not help but think of Caspian and that successful wine shop that he’d run in decadent Syracuse millennia before.

Methos would never admit that the reason that he’d helped Tjanefer with Ramirez was because Ramirez had lived in Alexandria at the end of Classical Antiquity. That he had wanted to wring Juan’s, as he had been going by when they’d last met, for a lovely stroll around the British Isle’s, mind for appropriate memories of the time period. It was because of Ramirez that he was concretely sure that it had been Cassandra inciting the crowd in Alexandria, and he could extrapolate from that what had happened.

Martos had set up a small sect of his cult in Alexandria, outfitted it with his less-than—charismatic, but rather manipulative First. Cassandra relied on her _voice_ to convince where her charms and the words of her teacher failed her. His best teachers were Julius of Venice and Isla, but Julius had been in Jerusalem, and Isla had asked to retreat for a few centuries until the religious upheaval calmed. He hadn’t granted her request, that was what Eva had learned from Ceoc so many years before, and she’d retreated to the mountains and a cave. He’d related the story that Julius had related to him when he’d run into the man in a town along the road to Constantinople.

Isla had descended from the mountain, alight with insight, with words spilling from her mouth, dreams spun into the air as she spoke them, contrary to what Martin believed. That the quickening itself was the Gathering, that it was sacrosanct, but too much holiness in one place led to friction, to violence. That the Immortals were a conduit for the Quickening, as the mortals were, and was there not proof that the mortals held the Quickening, that it killed them when it struck them? They were simply unable to absorb it, they did not have _malleable souls_ as the Immortals did, their Quickenings hardened against others. They could have no group soul, which freed them, did not make them less than mortals, simply far more individual than any Immortal.

It was 622. Martos had asked his child, his student to speak with him in his home on the Mediterranean, near the Pillars of Heracles. Julius had been visiting, happy to see his sister, and to introduce to her his first student and their sister’s newest student, Charlus. Instead, Julius had witnessed his teacher’s teacher take his line sibling’s head with accusations of treason skimming down his sword and treachery in his breath. He’d sworn his house a place of sanctuary, and later told those of his line that she’d challenged him. The sword that he’d planted on her after her death was a gladius, a Roman sword. Isla had faced the wrong end of them when her tribe had been put to the sword in Gaul during the reign of the first Caesar, and Julius had heard her swear that she would never handle one, on the gods of the tribes she’d been born to. The manuscript that Julius had found in her rooms, written in the vulgar Latin that they’d shared, the Gallic language that she’d spoken as a youngling written in Latin letters. Done phonetically. It had taken Julius three years to truly translate her book, and he’d known that he had never gotten the full breadth of her work, his understanding of the spoken Gallic had been imperfect at the time, and it had been several centuries since. In Latin, fully translated, he’d squirreled the book away, and told his line brother of it, naming it. ‘ _And thus spake Isla, daughter of Gaul, whose words are wise.’_

The year Isla had lost her head had been the beginning of yet more religious troubles, and Julius had wondered if his sister’s words had been disseminated, had survived, if the Immortal purging known as the Crusades would not have been as devastating to the Immortal population.

And in 415, Hypatia had died in Alexandria, the home of Methos’ favorite brewery, the city that he’d near worshipped since the third century BCE, but hadn’t set foot in since the ‘accident’ that Caesar had in the city.

He had traveled north, to Pergamum and the library there, and Kaspian had remained in Alexandria, with the lyceum and its questions of mathematics and science. He had danced attendance around the University of Alexandria. Later, when Theon was born, and became a teacher at the school there, he was there. He had watched the creation of Theon’s daughter, Hypatia, with glee, and assisted in their education, learning from the both of them with great alacrity.

Ramirez, Ramses, then, had been in Alexandria for some reason, in the 4th century, and he’d said that he was there for the purpose of trade. He’d found accommodations near his place of trade, and now that Methos thought on it, Ramirez had said that he’d been doing import/export work, buying and selling at profit. He had said that he’d run into Kaspian several times during his years there, and passed ways with Martos’ cult.

Oh, there were those Immortals, Methos thought, who were attracted to other Immortals for the joy of their company, as Ramirez had been, and the man had been an insufferable gossip, he’d always thought.

So Methos had made friends with Ramirez, originally to needle through the man’s knowledge of what had happened in the school that had surrounded Hypatia, and though the friendship had deepened, the lessons about what had happened to his brother Kaspian had crippled his heart, wracked his chest with sobs, and spread disorder, distaste through the rest of the line.

Ramirez had related it to him one night. He had met Kaspian through Hypatia, whom he had met at the University of Alexandria. She had been a lovely woman, if not inclined towards him romantically or erotically, and he had never the taste for those who would deny him their flesh sexually, and no issues with seeing a woman as an intellectual equal.

Kaspian was certainly not occupying her bed, and Ramirez thought in retrospect that she most likely shared her bed with Cleverness her bed partner, without the need for human romantic bed partners. A philosopher, a mathematician, an astronomer and astrologist, she was in a place with both Christian and what the Christians labeled pagan influences, and the battle between them enraged the city. Her friendship with Orestes, a man on the council of Alexandria, led to the rumors spread by Cassandra, a woman who kept council in the congregation of Cyril, Orestes’ greatest enemies. It was on her suggestion, that following in the wake of Hypatia’s death at the hands of an enraged mob, her students be brought to the congregation, and ritually cleansed.

Ramirez had not seen this, but what he related of what he had heard was disturbing.

            Forcible baptism was not unusual in the later Christian church, but what Cassandra had asked for was degrading, to Methos’ ears, for Kaspian. Being forced to one’s knees after having the baptism performed, a traumatizing experience for a man with the mind the like of Kaspian’s, she had taken his face in her hands, and _spoken_ to him, as if the words of a god were speaking through her.

            Kaspian’s mind, prone to flights of fancy and the occasional removal of his senses in light of outside overstimulation, had fled from her words. When he was forgotten as the citadel in which this infamy had taken place, Methos had pieced together from other sources, was abandoned, he had left the citadel, beginning a spree of killings that would lead to exorcisms in some places, imprisonment in others, and the execution preferred by many as the preferable end result to his abominations. Eating the brains of a victim would restore to the killer the victim’s soul, power, and intelligence. What Methos had found disturbing were the writings of his brother from the ages in which he’d run free. Kaspian had believed that through this he could restore his own rationality.

            So began the cycle that Ramirez would not know of Kaspian, the work that his brothers did to protect him, and to protect others from him. Methos could not bear to kill his brother, but he could not bear the possibility of his crimes being unleashed on another.

            The math, however, continued, scribbled with chalk on the edges of the room that he occupied at Sean Burn’s institution in France. The math, Methos hoped, was safe enough for his brother’s sanity to re-emerge, perhaps after the _vocalizing_ bitch was dead, and her power no longer fueling his madness.

            Cassandra’s line had much to pay for, she and her teacher who thought a group of philosophers and students a threat to their cult


	3. Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part III of E Fatto

Title:  _È fatto._

Author: optimouse

Summary: “The key of the battle isn’t in the victory, it is in the dance—the dance between good and evil allows free will. That said, the true champion battles not just evil, but good as well.”

Fandom: Highlander

Part III

 

 

 **Section A**

            The stone was granite. A light pink with black flecks, the stone was square, and standing at the foot of the grave, Methos curled into the familiar warmth of his coat. Today of all days, the wool of the trench coat did not do its job. The wind bit into his arms, but he did not notice as he watched the grave, a hand on the hilt of his sword.

 

 _Eos Elizabeth Northman_

 _Beloved Daughter and Granddaughter_

 _And Even Now Does Marchaue Haunt Our Lives._

 

            The last was in Linear A, Minoan Script, at the bottom of the inscription. It was fitting that it was used, when one considered that it had been the language that Martos had wrote in. And next to Methos, Kronos stood. Their hands were closely linked, though soon they would be separated in their mutual search of vengeance. No, this would be their last stand as who they were together for a very long time.

 

            _Nestor Northman_

 _Beloved Son, Father, and Husband_

 _Ethel Northman_

 _Beloved Daughter, Mother, and Wife_

 **  
**

 

 

 

 **Section B**

            Cassandra clenched her hands, attempting to halt herself. Having remade the bed in the Amsterdam hotel room six times already, not to mention, rearranged her clothes in various drawers three times, she had to cease her need to fiddle with things in her anxiety.

            In retrospect, her disobedience, or rather, her rash behavior in light of the sudden lead she’d had in her pursuit of children was foolish. She had not realized that she had caused the eye of the eldest student of her teacher still living. Kronos, whose first husband had rose up against their teacher in rebellion and had died at the hands of the soul of the only true people. She was familiar with him, his name—Charon. The Greeks had used his name as the title of the ferryman who had conveyed the dead over the River Styx. He had died of power, according to her Teacher, and only his three Brothers had survived. His husband having taken another Immortal soon after, Methos, who was alike of him in his face, as his second husband.

            Cassandra had heard of four Immortals that lived together—the Four Horsemen, during the founding of Carthage. She had spoken as Oracle in Dido’s Court at the time. Four who had joined Aganesthenes of Troy in the defense of Troy against the Achaeans? Kronos, his husband Metїos, and their brothers Scyllas and Kaspian. They had lived on the coast, in a farm near Troy, and the Achaean army had swept through, killing a child. Allain, born of Methos. Sila’s recount to her had been clear in that.

            It had piqued her interest, both that her Teacher’s traitorous children still lived and that a male Immortal had born a child. She had learnt that Misha, a female Immortal had born a babe a century before. Cassandra had found the bitch and her whelp deep in the land of a river and a lady, where the language was most barbarically spoken, and the skin color looked to be cursed by the gods.

            The woman was unworthy of the child, she had decided. Misha would not tell her how she bore the child, what magics she had weaved for the safe birth, and Cassandra could not read her entrails and those of the child for the answers she sought.

            Her interest had not been reined in since. She had taken students, and taught them in the manner that she had been taught. None of her students had gifts, and thus no protection against her _vocal_ commands. Cassandra assured their loyalty, to her, to her teacher, and she had yet to understand if she had placed her mission above her teacher’s mission, his cause, in their minds.

 

            **Find those with children. Tell me. Let me, us, find out why.**

 **  
**

            There were many that had been found, and she had lost students to her interests. Two centuries before, her teacher had spoken.

            Enough. Martos had stated. Enough. You have caused the death of three of your direct line through your madness.

            And she had disobeyed her teacher.

            Cassandra had been called by Paul Lucius.  He had heard from Ceirdwyn, who did not know that he was a student of Cassandra’s line. Ceirdwyn did not speak to Cassandra. She had worded it thus-

            “I have no words for those who use the gifts meant to aid to steal from others their safety.”

            Paul had related it to her, what he had heard.

            “Ceirdwyn and I were speaking of those she knew and their students.” He had called her collect from Spain. Cassandra had remembered her anger at the potential cost of the call. “Duncan MacCleod has taken a student, Richie Ryan. Headstrong child.” He’d gossiped a bit more, and then gotten to the point. “She spoke of Charles Kand, as he was called then, and is called now Cade Northman. He and his former student, she believes, a fellow Immortal named Aloysius, also called Alyssa when she met them, and the student is now Mary Northman, and they had a son in nineteen forty-six. That son, Nestor, who is now fifty. Nestor and his wife just had a child, a daughter.”

            Her interest had been peaked by her student’s recollection, and she’d begun the research that led her to this hotel in Amsterdam.

            She’d found interesting things in her search, like the name of the teacher of that upstart cultist. Peace, love, swords into plowshares, no one needed or deserved to die crowd-fodder.

            Heavy steps echoed in the hallway outside the hotel room that Teacher had given her instruction to find. She jolted from her dreams of ending the one who seemed to no longer have regard for the sanctity of her Teacher’s beliefs, for the beliefs of his followers.

            No, she must concentrate on how best to tell the story of the disobedience; rousing the Traitors by looking into something she’d been forbidden.

            How to tell her Teacher this? First that it was a happenstance comment that had piqued her interest. Paul had been gossiping. She had been curious, she had left them alone, and she’d done non-invasive research. She’d looked at Nestor’s school records, his attendance at Cambridge, his emergency contact at that time had been a man by the name of Aloysius Kand. She’d followed open legal avenues of research, and had hit divine blessing in the area now known as Chicago.

            The original deed on the house that had received the checks had pre-dated the city’s recognition in the United States, registered to an Eilam Silas. The name had rung a bell, and she’d run with it. Looking at the various deeds, she could bluff that she had thought that she’d found a rival to Martos’ beliefs. Another Immortal who had placed himself at the head of a cult. Very few lived in one place for long that were not involved with a cult.

            Variations of four names had reoccurred, she’d found in the records. For Cassandra, research had never been her true calling. She had asked Petunia to come to her, leave St. Louis for a few days. Cassandra had brought out the lists that it had taken years for her to compile.

            They had gone over the documents together, and Petunia had suggested cross-referencing the names with several of the Chicago newspapers. Petunia had thought that there might be photographic evidence with, and that was a correct guess.

            She had recognized Kronos’ picture from Sila’s description three millennia before.

            Silo had said. “That there are four of them, Kaspian with flashes of insight so fast that it seems that Athena speaks through him. Scyllas, likely to treat beasts as close as kin, can ride like the Thracians, thought they are all that skilled, but he becomes as one with his horse. Kronos, eye scarred as if slashed with a knife before first death, tall, broad shouldered. Methos, the quiet one. Eyes touched by Hera, always changing like Hera changes her husband’s women to animals to avoid her own embarrassment.”

            From a darkly smiling face, that scar had stood rampant as Cade Northman had held the hand of Mary Northman in their wedding, his brother Silas and his side, and his wife’s siblings, the two Immortals, the only known Immortal twins, Cornelius and Cornelia, standing at her side.

            Later, in the same newspaper, Cade and Mary announced the birth of their son Nestor Matthias Northman.

            And she’d checked the registered lease papers next, Petunia had. Damian Northman was renting the house in its entirety from Eilam Hippos. And four doors down, Nestor and Ethel Northman owned a two-story house with an attached garage and a small courtyard in the back.

            There was a third registered resident.

 

            Eos Northman.

 

            Cassandra moved behind the door, removing her coat and handing it on the hook there, then withdrawing the sword within its folds, next to her own. Striding to the bed, she laid it on the covers with an audible sigh of relief at losing its weight.

            Her first trip into the dead of night, stealing in like that thief, Amanda, into the house. The mortals had been visiting the big house for the night, and she’d read their house.

            The kitchen was well-used, loved, laid out to be friendly to visitors and family, and opened into the family room, the dining room. Above the mantel was what had caught her notice. Four swords above an embroidered tapestry.

 

            ‘Children of the Sword,

            Of Lightning,

            Not Bound of It.’

 

            She looked at the sword, laid on the bed, a silent admission of guilt, and her only hope of the punishment [for it] to be abridged.

            Cassandra turned towards the door, hearing the proximity of her teacher like the tension of a wire stretched almost until it snapped.

            The key was inserted into the lock, the door opened, and she wished that the tumblers had taken more time to turn.

            More time. Time, time, she needed more time. Eyes the brown of mud looked to her, set into a face that was a mite too thick for the moderns’ to find attractive, and reminded her of the age of her teacher. A sneer was already painting his face as he gazed upon her.

            “What is this idiocy that I’ve heard of your doings, Ca-sa-and-ra?” He drew out the syllables of her name as she stumbled through her mind. Martos closed the door, throwing his bad to the side as he walked to her seat on the bed, lifting the sword to catch it in the light. “And where did you find this?”

            Martos unwrapped the sword from its holdings of wrapped tapestry. Bronze, new smithing, antique style, but done with swill.

            He brought up the hilt to the light. There, on the meeting off the crossguard and the grip was an embossed symbol. It was a Phoenician letter, a kaph, which looked like an inverted K. He had not seen it’s like, in Phoenician, outside of his personal belongings, in a time far too long, yet still too short for his liking.

            Martos’ hands were shaking as he tested the edge of the blade with his thumb.

            “You’ve certainly found something, Cassandra.” The mud brown eyes sharpened as Martos turned the sword over in his hands. It had the wrong feel for the bronze, and he hefted it into the air. “You found this in your troubles?” There, he felt it. The smith must have used a bar of steel at the center of the sword, running the length of the sword from the grip to the tip, to give it heft, cut down on whippiness, and to try and combat the problem that he could remember of bronze, that on occasion, it shattered.

            “I found it at the beginning of the troubles, Teacher.” She stated. “On the wall of the house of the family that piqued my interest.”

            “You drew Kronos’ gaze to yourself.” He worded it as he knew it to happen. “You heard of a boy child born of Immortals, and as you garbled it to me in your cry for help, Cassandra, he had found a wife, as mortals are prone to do, and had a child. An Immortal had a grandchild, well, two Immortals, anyway.” He blinked, turning the sword over in his hands again, feeling the heft, the finality of the sword in his hands. “Did you take the sword off of the wall?”

            “No.” Martos clenched his jaw, anger rushing through him, worry. Kronos hunted his student, her stupidity having drawn to herself the notice of one of the strongest Immortals. He had a feeling that the other Immortal still dogged Cassandra’s path, probably lurking in the outskirts of Amsterdam with a grudge.

            “Then how did it come to your hand, Cassandra?”

            “The morning after I returned to my home, I rose from my bed at the house that was renting, and went to retrieve the milk. There, in the courtyard in the front of the house, the sword plunged through the tapestry and into the dirt beneath, a wreath of poppies hung on the crosspiece, and the end of the grip had a stripe of red ribbon tied through it, scales tied to the end of the ribbon.”

            “A warning.” Martos stated. “The wreath of Thanatos, Kronos’ sword, the ribbons for blood-guilt owed, and the scales for justice.” Martos paused. “He is honorable, he will hunt you, dog your steps. The blood guilt holds a seven year period of danger to the one whom has crossed the other.” Martos hefted the sword again, thinking momentarily of taking his student’s head himself and ridding himself of her obsession. Unfortunately her gifts reinforced the loyalty of too many of his line to attempt it without knowledge of where their loyalty would remain in the case of her death, and thus her head stayed with her. “Kronos will never take you head if you stay by my side, so you will travel with me for your safety.” _And mine_. His student had raped the minds of others of their line to keep their loyalties with him. There would be much anger if she did not survive. “Now tell me what you did next?”

            “Well, the mortal Son told me that his Bearer was in Seacouver, so I went to see if Duncan could help me, wove the story that Methos, whom I had thought to be called Aloysius Kand once,  had offended me in the past, in the madness in which he was taken as Kronos’ husband. They will find no succor in Seacouver, Teacher.”

            “What else have you left out?” Martos knew better than to not question her story, she would obfuscate the whole truth by telling little truths, and had done such for years.

            “Petunia Kelley is dead, fallen to the sword, but no evidence that it was Kronos who did the killing, and we both know that Metїos would not do killing, even on vengeance. He is weak.”

            “True. So she fell victim to the Game.” Martos concurred. “Any other deaths?”

            “No.” Well, not to her knowledge, or his.

 

 

 

 **Section C**

            The world had changed since those days when he had been a young Immortal, running from the buzz long enough to survive. He had gone from running on foot, to horseback, to boat. How do you explain the novelty of a horse, a mule, to a man who had grown up with them. Cars were nothing on learning of beasts tamed to work. He had been a member of a tribe of hunter-gatherers, a way of life that a farmer would never understand, with different morals, different practices, different lives.

            How do you live this life? You start life in a hovel somewhere in what is now Africa, with twelve siblings. Now the language you spoke as a child is no longer known to man, and Sumerian, one of your first learned languages, is qualified as dead.

            Some things remained the same, the most basic of behavioral patterns: the attempts to attract a mate, mourning, the protection of a child. The methods changed, but the intent remained the same.

            But how do you explain to a man who grew up with only one species of sentients that once there were more than one, and that it was during your lifetime that you had watched the last die out? Telling that your teacher was not Homo sapiens sapiens, but rather close.

            Martos passed as modern, but with effort.

            How to explain a Pharaoh, ascendant? A god on Earth, beloved and loving.That his power was divine and defining, without terror or tyranny, or a definition of either.

            Martos couldn’t explain it, but then, he had never wished to explain it, rather to embody it.

            Looking down at his student’s head curled against his shoulder, he smiled. Perhaps he had embodied the Pharaoh successfully in the eyes of his loyal students. Cassandra certainly thought he was all-knowing.

 

 

 

 **Section D**

Where does one find the chasm between justice and revenge was a thought that Methos had often entertained, and in the same line of thought was a similar question that plagued his mind. When did vengeance become madness, become massacre?

He was not the man that he had been earlier today. Leather trousers were not a plain linen shift, thought the braids and beads were.

The change of his husband’s questing quickening had woken him from his one-night lover. The man had paused in his thrusting as Leto had halted his ministrations, in light of the feeling. Complementary nudity, given the newly paused play, was appropriate, and as Methos danced, the beads and braids that he’d cultivated of an afternoon, he wondered at his husband’s reactions.

He’d once told Duncan Macleod that he would never marry another Immortal, and he’d meant it. He would never marry another Immortal in the fashion that the child-Scot understood marriage to be. His husband, brother, spouse, lover—that was Kronos. Their marriage was-well, marriage was the word in English that fit the idea of their bonding best.

The ceremony was ancient, performed in Akkadian, and Methos still transcribed and translated it to his most recent vernacular annually. It was spoken, vows with a celebrant and witnesses initially.

 

 _“As I am, as I was, and as I will be, I offer my full self to you in all ways as you recognize I cannot be naught by what I am, and that you cannot be naught but what you are.”_

 _“I recognize that you cannot be but what you are, and accept you into myself for as I am, as I was, and as I will be. To you interests I will accept, and allow us both caution in our interests. To each other’s ends, our ends, and our Honor [Word], I shall hold us true.”_

 

They had been witnessed by their brothers, poured libations to the spirits, and had been sealed by their teacher.

 

The end of the morning’s play had taken him to his storefront, and closing everything down for the day.

 

Methos, as fond as he was of the Watchers, thought that there were things that they did not need to know.

Extinct forms of ritual purification and dedication that lasted from the days when Marchaue had the Triumph of leaders, that dated from a now singular line, in Rebecca’s death. no,  those who recorded, they needed no knowledge of ritual.

The Christians and baptism.Hindus and their immersion in their gods as they were embodied as rivers. The Israelite mikveh. He’d converted a whirlpool into a fully functional tub, and enlarged the hot water tank to allow for it.

He’d learned a trick years before, that he hated to use now, or ever, but it was necessary. The waters were blessed, and completely devoid of ornament he’d descended into the tub. Myrhh was the incense, reminding him of the blessings he’d given his husband as a priestess of Inanna.

Lastly, he’d skinned his scalp, and he’d left the blade’s clean kin on the side of the tub.

The descent complete as the blood pooled into the water around his shoulders, he’d recited the purification and its climax of death as the knife entered his chest.

Drowning. Skull wound. Heart would. The question was always what had killed him first, and as he was purified, as he fought through death and came out victorious, only to be felled again by death. Dedication, pain, clarification. Resolve created in water as he struggled to emerge complete, of pure mind and whole body from the water.

Feet dripping water against cedar slabs, he’d pulled the shift over his still stained body. The urn was vaguely Grecian, and filled with wine that Silas had vented for his son’s wedding. The ashes of his family had joined the wine there. Grasping the handles, Methos ascended the building, up, up, and up to the roof terrace.

Words, power, blood. Gifts given, reminders still precious as dressed in his purity, he gave notice of loss.

Tens of tiny braids, brushed clean and beaded crashed against the leather of his belt and their comrades as Methos felt them brush over the remnants of the lines painted of his skin, as his hands touched naught but air.

Purification.

Complaint.

Dedication.

So now, as he was of Inanna, so many years before, he danced as he was, the shimmer of brass, of glass, of bronze spun its web in his hair, calling, calling, calling back to what had touched him.


	4. Part IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part IV.

Title:  _È fatto._

Author: optimouse

Summary: “The key of the battle isn’t in the victory, it is in the dance—the dance between good and evil allows free will. That said, the true champion battles not just evil, but good as well.”

Fandom: Highlander

 

Part 4

 

 

 

 **Section A**

Pittsburgh, Kronos thought, was a dump.

He could see it as a port, as a place of commerce and a crossroads, and had even worked there while his husband was overseas, having accompanied Nestor to England, to get him settled for school.

That didn’t mean that he liked the city. It was nasty business that he and Methos were doing, nasty, cruel business that he wouldn’t want to explain to some of their more noble, more far flung students. They had managed to imprint a streak of practicality and a bit of sneakiness into their line. Unfortunately, the brothers’ attempts had been unable to affect all of those in the lines. The youngest MacCleod, Methos II, and William Naples all seemed to on occasion abandon their common sense for chivalry.

He was yet to arrive in Pittsburgh, but he had just abandoned the trail of Cassandra as she went abroad, her plane ticket’s final destination matching with the published itinerary of her Teacher. Of Martos, named Martin Beauregard, and it would not surprise  Kronos if even his students under that name did not know that he was the fabled head of their line, the Speaker of the Words of the Quickening, as Eva had told Scyllas from what she had learnt from Ceoc and Lorne Skele, nearly a millennia before.

Finding the bodies of his family, bringing that news to his husband, far though they strayed from each other, had been crippling. Now, as the world sped up in their hunt, they came together and remembered.

They hadn’t run into Cassandra in the Bronze Age, in a transient, enraged state after the loss of Marchaue. Oh, they’d certainly pillaged, perhaps had even raped, though they had definitely killed in those days. Oh, they were blurred, and he was quite certain that his husband perhaps had the most memories of those days. He and Scyllas and Kaspian, now Caspian and Silas, each having had their own students, they had blurred away the memories of the time, and their consciousness as well. Their life may have centered around finding the _Traitor,_ but they had been caught up in the trauma of the destruction of the city, of their homes, of their students, of their spouse, for Scyllas, for the animals, the horses, the babies. For Kronos, it was the near death of his husband, of seeing his spouse laid near to a sack of bones on the ground, the sword that he had not used in combat for nearly a century having melted around his hand, the bronze having separated to copper and tin in the lines of his Charon’s fingers.

He had walked through the hulk of their house, and the scene then had mirrored the scene that he had seen months before. The babe in the crib, the child in the kitchen, near to the fire that their death, that the child, falling into the fire as the corpse hit the ground, and causing fire to spread. There had been differences, of course. The style of the house. The babe in arms, in Marchaue, that babe had been born near to a year before, and his husband had been burgeoning with a child, his waist just beginning to thicken. The child in Chicago was his grandchild, visiting her ‘Uncle,’ and it was his son, his daughter whose corpses, mature as they were, were found. Nestor had been tortured, his corpse had held the proof of that. There had been no fire to blacken the walls, and his memories of soot and ash were from the taste of ozone in the air.

He hated Pittsburgh, a city of soot and blackened coal. But hate could be tempered with blood, used to hone a sword of justice, a sword baptized in the blood of enemies. This was a death trap, this city.

Traps, traps were his husband’s ways. He remembered the Bronze Age. His memories of the madness were blurry, but he would be unsurprised if the memories his husband retained of the time period were soaked in blood, detailed in knife-thin planning, and honed to the sharpest edge. He would be unsurprised to know that his husband could recall every minute detail of the hunt then, the hunt that had lasted nearly a millennia, claimed many lives, and shaded, painted the sands of la proche-est[i] with blood, tacky as it dried in the sun. Methos had hunted with such purpose of mind that Cassandra’s story to the younger Macleod had seemed nearly plausible to the device that he had used on the glass at the building. DeSanto’s Dojo, he thought. Maybe something else, but very close to that idea had actually happened.

They had kept slaves during that period, but that was no different than any other group of people at the time. Cassandra knew that, knew the way of the world, and without a doubt, would have known the way a man whose love affair with the daft notion of chivalry would react. A virgin woman, of the type that Duncan’s teacher Connor would have grown up with, the type of Celtic woman, and the type of woman in that area, would have been a woman standing alone, upon her own two feet. She might manipulate chivalry, but embrace it? No, Cassandra had known the reality of her time. She had most likely kept slaves, as her footsteps had been traced back showed her as certainly being born into a culture that would have kept them, and she’d certainly embraced the practice according to rumor, in Carthage.

The legend of that slaughter had been used for generations as a tool to tell little children not to upset the order of things in the universe, not to show one’s integrity, one’s intelligence in public.

So here he was, having abandoned the footsteps of Cassandra for his husband’s foresight and planning in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh of all places.

Kronos knew that his signature would alert his husband before he arrived in the area, before he was visible. Certainly the fact that he'd sent it questing through Pittsburgh searching for Methos meant that he'd already warned him that he was coming. Of course, he'd also warned George Byron that he was on his way as well, not that he thought that the _artisan_ needed to be warned, but as Methos' student, he'd certainly already learnt of the appropriate place of caution in survival.

So walking up to the club that he'd thought to be his goal, he was assured by the music. It wasn't pounding metal, but the anger still throbbed. Of course, he could smell the sex, the sexuality, the pure _wanting_ in the air, and he was pretty damned sure he was in the right place. There were things that his husband had used in the past to funnel his rage into, and while the Horsemen, the rampage, that was certainly the most destructive of those things, it wasn't the one that Kronos thought had been the most productive.

He'd seen his husband hunt before, certainly. He was quite good at it, the cave in between Europe and Asia with the huge charts that they'd put together in the late seventies and early eighties was quite informative, and the fact that all of the students who had some wish to be involved in their oath-born destructive path had the knowledge on how to find the cave. They'd gone in and out of it for the last twenty years, and he knew that his husband had gone up into the mountains to read the histories, remember the reasons for anger.

This was a rededication of anger, of loss brought to the forefront in a way that was not always adhered to by the family. The horsemen, the violence that they had become in the wake of Marchaue, that had crippled them for nearly an age, and this was it as it could have been, perhaps as it should have been.

And there he was, his husband was, on the dance floor. The hair had grown out again, to a length that he hadn’t seen his husband where it at in over thirty years. He remembered holding Methos’ braid in one hand and his knife in the other, whispering sweet words into his ear as he removed the braid. Kronos had not enjoyed that usual pleasure, remembering the fact that for the last few years, the ritual was for Kronos to brush and braid Methos’ hair before bed, a prelude to the sex that would follow as he enjoyed the fact that the Mary who wore Methos’ face was his husband underneath, the hard cock that spent it’s days tucked under the lean body, the stays that Methos wore under Mary’s clothes removed, and the illusion of the breasts dissipated as the nipped in body took form.

Mary’s face was just another face of Methos’, and the form on the dance floor, writhing between the bracketing bodies of two men, blond and brunette bookends, that was Methos too.

They offset his husband’s beauty. The nose that had been broken long before he’d met Methos, long before his husband died on the brink of manhood. The pale skin that had not been that pale months before, when he’d warned him to flee in Seacouver as the hunt for Cassandra had begun. And this wasn’t Mary’s hair that Methos wore, this was the purity of hair that came from a blessing, to the thighs in pure new growth, and that told Kronos more than he’d planned on in a flash of illumination. Methos had purified himself, taken the first steps towards a dedication of purpose. His husband was dancing for his pleasure, not his own pleasure. Asking that he be taken in by Kronos, that his offerings be taken not just by the gods, but by his _god_ , his _husband_.

In the end of all things, Kronos realized, Methos asked to recreate the truths that had created their marriage. An offering from one Immortal to another, a form purified, but not an offering freely given, but rather an offering that would have to be captured. Purity of purpose would come in the night, as he painted dedications over his husband’s skin in ink, then later dragged a broad knife through the dedications, wrote them into the skin, into the flesh, the muscle, the bone, and into the heart, where they would echo off of themselves, whispering in the heart.

So perhaps Pittsburgh wasn’t so bad, Kronos thought, stalking forward through the crowd, tapping the blond interloper on the shoulder and taking his spot. An arm encircling the waist of his husband, he looked down into the eyes painted with kohl. And it was kohl, not eyeliner, he realized, harkening back, not to when he had taken his husband first as his husband, but the years that they’d spent in Persia, watching his husband dance. It had been what it had been, and for a moment, he was tempted to press his hand down the leather trousers to check that the sac that was his, on another body, was still there, and not removed. He resisted. There was a time for everything, and the time to grope Methos on the dance floor was not now.

Now was the time to enjoy life for a moment, a time for fields to fall fallow as the farmer prepared for a more bountiful crop than the constant use would allow. This was a time to rest for the war, to indulge and rededicate, to remember that life could not be sacrificed for vengeance, not life in its multiplicities and layers.

Oh, Kronos had not remembered that little twist of his husband’s hips. Where had he first seen it? Temple of Ishtar, that was it. Babylon, so many years ago, and why would he start using it again now? The question ran through his head. The Temple of Ishtar in Babylon had given them both so many good memories, happy memories, his husband as a eunuch-priestess.

Now it hit him over the head. They were in another sort of temple. The name of the club, of course. And Methos was pushing him to ask a question, was he not, a question that he had not asked in a long time.

“May I give my essence to be dedicated to the Goddess in her multiplicity of faces?” And there it was, the smile, the beckoning hands that led him away from the dance floor and away from the club.

 

 

 

 **Section B**

            The bakery was all well and good, Byron thought of his teacher/student, but Leto Amunsen, for all his life in this incarnation centered on breads and sweet bits, did have more fervor in his body than the endless experimentation that being the best of his trade required.

            His creation of this particular Immortal identity had actually been born in the sixties and seventies, the student of George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron. While he had been the teacher of George, so few centuries ago, it had seemed prudent at the time to create a new Immortal Persona. A youth, a child-Immortal not an _Ancient_ , there were so few of them left, now, and it did no good to be hunted by the youths for the Quickening or for his expression of knowledge. He rather thought that if he had thought rather than reacted to Duncan Macleod’s question of his name, his interaction with the chivalric fool would have ended in a far more positive ending for the both of them.

            Leto Amunsen in all his forms, as an Immortal had a burning lust for life. He’d died his first death at the hands of an angry lover, the second death a bad dose of LSD, the third death at the hands of overly loud speakers. The fourth death was another lover. 3 days, four deaths, Leto was quite lucky to run into someone who had disabused him of true Immortality instead of the facsimile that the Immortals embraced. He had kept his edgy lifestyle, but moved to another outlaw profession than in the clubs.

            The pirate radio ships were not technically illegal, but instead were encroached upon by the various governments slowly. They were on the outskirts of legality and generally frowned upon.  Leto’s adoration, obsession, inclination towards the music that was sweeping the world was heavy enough that he decided to become a radio DJ.

            That was how Byron had found Methos again. Radio Albion, anchor dropped off of the coast of Britain. The accent had been new, dancing along the edge of Hadrian’s Wall, but the timbre hadn’t been that different. He had addressed a letter to his former teacher, and then joined him aboard ship, becoming the supposed teacher of the _youthful_ immortal.

            Byron’s debauchery had bled onto his student, according to the Watchers, having at last traced their errant member to his supposed origins, while watching him move upon the dance floor. Leto Amunsen danced among the crowd, drank, became euphoric, and went mad along the edge, never without the passion that he shared with his teacher, then with his lover.

            Oh, the Watchers had found that as well. Leto Amunsen had met a youth attending Cambridge named Nestor DuTemps, introduced him to a lass named Ethel, called Ada. In return for the love of his life, Nestor DuTemps introduced Leto Amunsen to a close family friend name Kyros Eschaton.

            Kronos. Melvin Koren.  Finn Eudaimos. Finn DuTemps, Cade Northman, Charles Kand. And there had been passion. Oh, all of George Byron’s words and paintings told him this. His beautiful teacher’s reinvention of himself never did not include his heart’s mirror. In LetoAmunsen, debauched student of George Byron, it was KyrosEschaton, Kyros from the attic Greek Kyrios, and the head of the household. Eschaton, the end of days. While George had noted his teacher’s rather dark humor, in this Methos had not made the decision.

            Leto had gained a reputation in Europe; not Byron’s ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know,’ but something almost more frightening. He did not seek out danger, or the rush of the quickening, but he suffered no fools, and avoided the showmanship of his teacher in dealing with those who had challenged him. He obeyed the laws of the fight, if not the feeling of them, arranging accidents to avoid the duel, never taking a quickening if he could help it, in fact, he was known to completely avoid Challenge altogether if possible. When Methos had told Macleod a few years before that he had not taken a quickening in two hundred years, what he had meant, and Byron had not known, that the last time that he had done so was in defense of his student’s life. If Kronos had known, his husband’s sensitivity to himself or another having taken a quickening was obvious, and reasonable.

            Kronos knew that his husband had not taken a quickening normally since before he battled Ahriman.  Ritual re-enactment of a battle, yes, and always fought to a standstill. The problem with the battle was that it was not supposed to take place in the middle of a group of many, or that the enemy was not to be brought into the home of the other. Fair game was not a true concept yet, but undue influence of the enemy was; the goal was balance, not overpowering, and neither avatar was intended to triumph.

            It was not, certainly, as it had been, after Marchaue.

            But Byron knew none of this. What he knew was that his teacher had a reputation for violence and ruthlessness to rival a great many politicians, and that his teacher had resumed the _Leto Amunsen_ persona following the death of his son, his daughter by marriage, and his beautiful granddaughter, following the trail of blood that the _voiced_ woman had smeared on Chicago.

            So here he was, lounging in the gallery of his teacher’s shop, looking at the artwork strewn around the room, fastidiously kept away from the baking area. His teacher had been working on a painting, and as he looked at it on the drafting table, he winced at the looks of it. His teacher was crying vengeance onto canvas, bleeding tears of grief in colors that would remember the lost children, not just this family but family lost before, and the original family lost in Marchaue.

            Upstairs a particularly hard thrust pushed the bed against and off of the wall, and George Byron, formerly Lord Byron, now called Byron Georgeson sighed. Perhaps’ coming to his teacher’s aid was a silly idea, at least when he’d come.  He knew better than to expect to be able to play with his teacher, to hunt or even communicate when his teacher was still enraptured with his Kronos. When they returned to each other, even if it was only hours, they realized that they’d missed the most of themselves, and had to reconnect themselves.

            This night was a night for reflections, and not a night for work, that was clear. Maybe that Javier, the one who was more curious than was safe for one of the folk who watched, would be willing to go out?

 

 

 

 **Part C**

            Swords-play for three thousand years had only changed in its accoutrements. Stab, slash, defend, that was what Kronos had been taught. Here in the warehouse that Methos had found, and that Byron had lured Martos and Cassandra to.

            Here he stood, here stood Ceoc, and there stood Dade Winston, his student and his student Lorne’s student. Here knelt Metїos, called Methos, hands on the earth as he prayed. It was familiar to him, the prayer if not the battle-prayer. Perhaps it was his husband’s early life that had changed him. It was legend that his husband was born in the land of the Black Earth and the River. It was myth that an abandoned child was left on the altar of a temple of Inanna in Ur, and was found by the Lady’s Priests playing with the Lady’s serpent. Her divinity made flesh, intertwined with her Avatar.

            So his husband, the one he was sworn with, prayed, Kronos noticed, and across the floor, Cassandra and Martos whispered. Martos, whom he had found so many years before while looking for a teacher of swords-play, as the wretched Game grew into prominence. Martos had wielded the sword well, but looking back at what they’d learned in his hands, not the best.

            “What are these rules you spoke of?” Cassandra whirled from her teacher to ask across the cement floor of the warehouse. There would be no give in that floor if you fell across it, Kronos thought, and in the safety of a ring of holy ground, Ceoc spoke with disbelief coloring his tone.

            “What did Teacher teach you?” He asked, and proceeded to review the whole nasty business. “As in regular challenge, there can be no fighting on Holy Ground, not that it was originally in the rules, but rather that the rules do not preclude the rules of Holy Ground. However, there must be safe ground nearby.” His student Dade whispered into his ear. “Vengeance – Challenge is fought by the two involved, one called, one calling for vengeance. As many reasons for challenge as wanted by the Challenger may be brought, provided that only one Challenges another, though two challenges may be called for at the same time, and provided that those challenged stay within the ring. The Challengers have the right to choose whom fights whom, as it is an extension of the choice of whom is Challenged, as well as to the ending of the match. That said, all have four days armistice after the Challenge is called. Oh, and Stepping or falling purposefully into the external ring changes the match into a challenge ended only by beheading, which is an option until then.”

            “Do we have the right to know our challengers? Our Summoners?” Cassandra asked, and looked surprised when her Teacher answered her questions. “Our _supposed_ crimes?”

            “As I helped write the Rules for the” he used its first name, loosely “Vengeance-Challenge, I can tell you the answer to that, Cassandra. We have the right to know the Challengers, their lines, and the guilt we owe them.” The words started to harken back to the patterns of the mindset in which they were agreed upon. “And the names of all those present.”

            “I am George Byron,” And Martos glared at the Immortal who had come to their hotel room door and given them a note, refusing to leave until they read it and followed him, a hand on a hidden sword hilt. “Lord Byron once, taught by the immortal who called himself John Polidori. He gave his line as from the line of Kaph. I acted to summon you for the Vengeance-Challenge for the first acknowledged Teacher of our line.” He finished. “As friends of the Immortal known as Eva the Neutral, I also delivered Summons to the line of Ceoc, teacher and student Dade Winston, as they are taught of the Line of Martos, wholly taught, but the will stand witness as allies to those Neutral.” George had placed his own flourish on that which had to be said-he knew there was no formula to it except that it had to be said.

            And fully out of the shadows of the warehouse and into the ring and the light given by the skylights above stepped Kronos, and it would be later said that his footsteps caused the earth to thunder and his words echoed in the sky’s tears, but his steps were soft and his words strong, and the sword on his back nearly his height.

            He spoke in Italian for the clarity of all involved, as had every word of the conversation, and so that it could not be claimed that he was not understood.

            “I stand in Challenge.” The phrasing was ancient, the language not quite explaining the whole of the meaning. “I, Kronos, a teacher of the Line of Kaph, sworn once with Charon born to Inanna.” He paused, caught his husband rising to his feet. “Sworn now with Methos called Death. I Challenge Ca-san-dra, the Tongue of Martos, Adept of _Voice **[ii]**_ , as she has spilt the blood of my son, Nestor, my daughter in marriage, Ada, and my granddaughter Eos, in a time not of war.” Across the room, Martos’ hand snaked out to clap his student for her stupidity.

            “You silly cunt.” Martos spoke in the language that he’d spoken when he had first met her, then reverted into Italian again. “But by what right am I called?”

            From the area he had earlier been kneeling, Kronos watched his husband step forward and comprehension, worry, and finally terror slowly dawn and then be hidden on his repudiated Teacher’s face.

            Cassandra watched the seventh man approach, puzzled. Hundreds of miniscule braids draped against a torso bare of all but a single stripe of blue, following face, neck, and down to where it disappeared into the waist of his paints. As George Byron spoke, her teacher murmured expletives beside her in a language that she did not know and his eyes sought out the man’s weaponry.

            “I see you do not truly recognize the man you accused of rape?” Cassandra’s mind swept back to the dojo in Seacouver, recognizing and accusing the man, Methos, of rape. She’d only seen him once before that day, pointed out to her by a student in Carthage as she’d sheltered from the Peloponnesian Wars. He had been with a merchant crew, she remembered, and that was the name given to her for him, and when she’d realized he was the mother of Kronos’ children, and wished to find him, she’d taken the expeditious way. She’d wished to _learn_ of it, and thus she’d given the accusation, torn away his support, and gone for his head only to find naught but a trail of corpses of those who had knowingly given her aid in her search for children.

            She still did not comprehend. He had to have had direct insult by her Teacher to Challenge him, she’d thought.

            “Your teacher knows his name.” Byron taunted Cassandra. “Why would he lie to his Tongue as she lies for them, for him, to their students and reinforces it with her _voice_?”

            “He lied to everyone.” The voice spoke Italian with a Latin accent. “That does not excuse you.” And he dismissed her. “I call Martos, City Speaker, last of the Triumvirate that ruled Marchaue left alive through his trickery, to the ring. He gave guilt when he introduced knowingly, the one known as Ahriman into Marchaue. His _animus_ then infected the city such that the night I was reborn again, the city killed itself and he ran from the carnage. Who am I to call you to the circle?” Kronos was smiling, the scar stretching, and for the first time Martos realized that swirls had been painted onto his former student’s face, familiar swirls. “I am Death, who once swore vengeance upon you as I took the name Methos from the name Charon, whose city you knowingly allowed into danger as you searched for the meaning of the Quickening. Do you deny this?” Methos asked, within the circle at last, the light catching the sword he only now seemed to hold such that an engraved kaph was visible.

            “I cannot.” Martos spoke, his voice deepening as if he were impelled to truth.

            “Would you place your students in similar danger in the same quest?” Cassandra, Ceoc, and Dade were for the first time admitted to the truth of it.

            “I already have.” And then battle was engaged.

 

 

 

 **Section D**

When the letter arrived, the handwriting was unfamiliar. A group of Polaroids had fallen out of the envelope, photographic proof of a paradigm change. To Duncan it was that the envelope had arrived through the USPS mail, and had the appropriate legal stamps to have originated here in the States. Someone knew who he was, and enough that they knew where he was.

The accompanying note was handwritten in a non-distinct scribe’s hand, protecting the writer and aging them as to before the Gutenberg Press.

Latin, the lingua franca among the Immortals since the days of Rome. Before that, it had been Greek, and before that, in his teacher’s understanding, Babylonian. It was replaced with Italian for some reason during the sixteenth century.

 _È fatto._

 _Si era conclusa per i crimini contro la casa di_ **κ** _. È stato eseguito per i suoi crimini contro la sua linea, il Triumvirate e Marchaue._

 _Punizione._

 _Il debito di anima è fatto fra i quattro cavalieri e la linea di Martos e la sua linguetta, Cassandra._

 _Mentre è scritto, sarà conosciuto._

 

 

 _It is done._

 _She had ended for crimes against the house of_ **κ** _. he has been executed for his crimes against his line, the Triumvirate, and Marchaue._

 _Retribution._

 _Blood debt is done between the four riders and the line of Martos and his Tongue, Cassandra._

 _As it is written, shall it be known._

 

Duncan placed the letter down, done, and picked up the phone. What was with this talk? Better to call his teacher to ask. Amanda was not speaking to him, having declared him foolish. Apparently Rebecca had called Cassandra a mind-twisting puppet of a fanatic, and when he’d called Amanda to demand what she’d known of Methos’ past, she’d told him what she knew.

“He once spent three decades hunting the man that raped Kassia, Mantius of Pylus’ student, as she’d worked as a nun in Jerusalem during the Crusades. He found him in France, raping his child-bride and the servant girls.” Amanda had paused. “He took the man in single combat in an area church yard and killed him there. On holy ground, in single combat. The man was judged as guilty of the crimes that he had been accused of, in the merit of his place and method of death. Methos was merely the hand of justice, a vengeful hand thrusting the point home.” Amanda had stopped then, started again. “Violence, yes. But always tempered by forethought, and never random.”

            Duncan picked up the phone and dialed.

            “Duncan?” The loved voice answered over the telephone. The wonder of modern technology and Rachel’s insistence on caller ID. He was sure that his teacher had used it to avoid his calls in the wake of Cassandra’s revelation, and as he mused, he heard his teacher heave a sigh. “You received the letter, I take it?”

            In New York, Connor MacCleod, called Russell Nash, looked down at the Polaroids. The photography was not amateur, but that did not surprise him. An Immortal that did not adapt was an Immortal with a chasm in place of a neck.

            “Yes. Could I ask you to read my symbology?” Duncan started at the roughness of his words. “I said that wrong…”

            “I understood you, thought,” Connor nudged his student. “You were to run it by me?”

            Duncan took the bait.

            “Bouquets of lilies, white for purity, but lilies are death flowers as well.  But they’ve been soiled, made impure. And resurrection, in Easter. They‘re dead lilies, beheaded. Impure immortality ended?” He moved to the next photo. “The sword is sheathed, either in anticipation of war or at the end of it.”

            “But what of the bloody cloth tied around the hilt?” Connor asked.

            “The war is ended, then.” Duncan looked at the last photo. “But why is the dagger stabbed into the earth?” He asked his teacher, confused.

            “The Earth is fertility in both of its forms.” Connor prompted.

            “The dagger has the end of threats, and new beginnings.” Duncan glanced over the photos again, confirming his reading. Two bouquets, and thus. “So two were killed for justice, in long vendetta or war, and now it is over, and the time is a time for new beginnings?” He pulled it together. “But why does the not speak of this Marchaue? What is it?”

 

 

 

 

 

 **Section E**

In Rome, what caught his eye was what had offended him.

 _È fatto._

The man smiled, and the air shivered.

Who had gotten to Teacher before him?

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

[i] The ‘Near East,’ French.

 

[ii] Cassandra’s _Voice_ is her ability to vocalize her will and make it happen, Cassandra’s form of magic, shall we say. It is canon.


End file.
